Guild Wars 2

This isn’t a post about the recent nerfs or the problems from nerfing PVE this is to explain to the Devs why I’m reluctantly deleting my ranger.

The overall problems with this class are beyond the problems with pets their AI and their weaknesses in this title in PVE. There’s just no charm. Let me explain.

In other titles there was prestige in being a class with pets. One could get special skins thru hard work and hunting, one could spend time with the pets daily to make them grow and feed them so they could one day become a special pet (or mount in games with mounts), there was a bond. I got this because I liked that feeling.

There was prestige because some skins took a long time to find, they were rare pets and took special set of skills to work out getting one tamed. That doesn’t exist in this game and yes I understand time restraints in getting out a game in development, but I think you pretty much removed something fundamental to why people play classes with pets in the first place.

In LOTRO I found the pets along the way that had special skins which dropped off of certain mobs (so yes I had to grind but still), in WoW I hunted the rare spawns althroughout the game for years and when they made it possible I made special pet food to give buffs to my pets, in AoC I fed and grew my tiger mount. All of these things are what makes pet handling fun imo.

The ranger class is missing all of these qualities. It became a class that was simply there as an alternative to the rest of the ranged classes. It didn’t seem special.

Now imagine this feeling on top of the problems with speed, dps, AI, pet defenses, skills that the pets don’t use themselves (we have to press an extra button), pets with no discernible roles where they don’t have trait trees of their own to modify or enhance their roles and you begin to see the reason why this class doesn’t hold the appeal anymore.

This games pet system is not very good, so if you’re looking for something comparable to WoW you probably won’t find it.

They’ve implemented rare pets in the past before…Anet probably wants to get pets balanced before they added new ones.

Besides, you could work on the Black Moa, White Raven, Black Widow and Rainbow Jellyfish in HoM.

as for me pet in gw2 ar rather good – systems about which You are talking imo makes that If You wanted a pet means SOMETHING You needed to pack a quadriliard hours to make this pet. (and later another infinite hours to be sure that Your pet’s isn’t hungry because You have packed too much time to risk that pet will abandon You).

I am glad i don’t have to do any of that with my pets. I like the fact i can tame it, and its mine to use, and there is no grind to make it special to me. In gw1 you did need to level your pet and that was okay. I am happy with not needing to do that in gw2 though.

This sort of thing would only be cool if rangers had a viable mechanic to opt out of pets altogether.

If we had to go grind and level and feed our pets just to make our class mechanic work that would just be……

I, for one, am glad there are no exclusive pets. I don’t want the focus of the Ranger to be on “who can collect the rarest pet”, but on the profession itself. If you want to feel exclusive, then just play the pets that aren’t used as much.

Also, why would you delete your Ranger? Unless you need the character slot, deleting it doesn’t make any difference at all..

Make ranger pet’s a class. There are a lot of people that play MMOs in pairs, ranger could be the first class that carters to them.

Kasama.8941:

I, for one, am glad there are no exclusive pets. I don’t want the focus of the Ranger to be on “who can collect the rarest pet”, but on the profession itself. If you want to feel exclusive, then just play the pets that aren’t used as much.

Also, why would you delete your Ranger? Unless you need the character slot, deleting it doesn’t make any difference at all..

cmon man, you don’t want a Pokeman-esque type of concept in GW2? Gotta catch em all!

Xsorus.2507:

This games pet system is not very good, so if you’re looking for something comparable to WoW you probably won’t find it.

Let’s be totally honest here… This game’s Pet system isn’t even a shadow of it’s Former Self. Pets used to have LEVELS, and sub-varieties that you trained them specifically to receive while they leveled up. They also had much BETTER Utility. You could make one Daze a boss for 20 seconds, or Perma knockdown along with the Hammer & crazy Adren-team gain rates (something ELSE that Ranger is sorely missing right now and there was no reason for Anet not to let us keep BunnyWay in this game considering how much Chain KD the mobs are allowed to do now).

The other thing missing that I’ll admit GW1 didn’t have… is an Evolution system for getting a Support-pet. IE: It Ascends to a new form like the Norn Spirits or w/e fits in with the Canon best… And that form just grants you the buffs you need to make up for whatever it’s Corporeal form usually isn’t compensating you with. This would be a MUCH better alternative to: “stowing” <— which right now is only a downside with no possible appendable “skill-based” Updsides

Kasama.8941:

I, for one, am glad there are no exclusive pets.

My Veteran White Raven would heartily disagree… but he’s too busy Soloing Aboms

ilr.9675:

Xsorus.2507:

This games pet system is not very good, so if you’re looking for something comparable to WoW you probably won’t find it.

(1)Let’s be totally honest here… This game’s Pet system isn’t even a shadow of it’s Former Self. Pets used to have LEVELS, and sub-varieties that you trained them specifically to receive while they leveled up. They also had much BETTER Utility. You could make one Daze a boss for 20 seconds, or Perma knockdown along with the Hammer & crazy Adren-team gain rates (something ELSE that Ranger is sorely missing right now and there was no reason for Anet not to let us keep BunnyWay in this game considering how much Chain KD the mobs are allowed to do now).

(2)The other thing missing that I’ll admit GW1 didn’t have… is an Evolution system for getting a Support-pet. IE: It Ascends to a new form like the Norn Spirits or w/e fits in with the Canon best… And that form just grants you the buffs you need to make up for whatever it’s Corporeal form usually isn’t compensating you with. This would be a MUCH better alternative to: “stowing” <— which right now is only a downside with no possible appendable “skill-based” Updsides

1. not sure about that – pets still have levels – just scaled to You now, nad the utilities You are talking about used place on RANGER’s skillbar – so very beastmaster builds was something like:
skill 1: trolls unguent.
skill 2: heal as one.
all the rest – pet skills
know pet have his 4 skill that don’t use place on our skillbar, also we don’t have control over them – with except to “F2” skill.
we have some shouts to order pet making another things than just atacking.
but in gw1 we have 8 skil slot we could do with them everything – in gw2 we have 5 weapon slot (we can only change the weapon to change them) one “must” heal one “must” elite and 3 utilities.
so we don’t have place for those former 6 pet atacks.

2. that could be interesting mechanic’s
but ask is – did that “support” version of pet would be killable? if not… sorry that was be another reason to not taking spirits (they are supporting and they are killable)

Kasama.8941:

I, for one, am glad there are no exclusive pets. I don’t want the focus of the Ranger to be on “who can collect the rarest pet”, but on the profession itself. If you want to feel exclusive, then just play the pets that aren’t used as much.

Also, why would you delete your Ranger? Unless you need the character slot, deleting it doesn’t make any difference at all..

There are “exclusive” pets if you count the ones that GW2 players can not get that were only available for GW1 players – wish I’d known that and wish I’d heard about GW1.

What irks me most about “pets” is how little damage they do compared to the “wild” animal – it isn’t logical and isn’t smart – this game needs to expand it’s “pets” – if we have a “bond” why can’t we communicate with them – most other animals TALK.

I have to agree GW2’s pet system certainly has faults, however they also have some major improvements over other game pet systems.

First and foremost, GW2 pets have generaly excellent path finding. The occasions when a pet takes a senseless detour are very few, and easily overcome by using pet swap.

I think the way pets are now is a good starting point, but they have a long way to go.
There are no upgrades currently. There is no way to improve your pet. Other classes can chase better weapons and sigils, but our weapon, our pets has no progression.

Pets are currently balanced in a negative fashion. By negative instead of being balanced to make them more fun they are balanced to not be OP in PVP.

Even though Arenanet claims to have adopted split balancing, they have yet to roll back a single Pet nerf that was instigated by PVP.

Another negative type of balancing is the fear of some devs that 5 rangers could steamroll dungeons, which seems to be reserved for 4 warriors and 1 mesmer at this time.

Sorry to see you go, but I can understand, as Arenanet so far has not been very supportive of the class or pets specifically.

I’m a pet addict, so I will most likely play the class no matter how munged up it stays.

Pets are a lot better than what they were when I started playing months ago. Pathing, IMO, still needs a lot of help. They really need to back off the stance of always having a pet. Being able to stow the pet permenatly would be a god-send and a pet specific buff for doing so would be superbly awesome. Let me call on it when I need it. The fact they balance around PVP unbalances the rest of the game modes. After the S&R nerf, I rolled a warrior specificalliy for running dungeons because they one highly sought after trait I had was no longer there. I guess I could have taken the deletion route, but I still find the class fun to play despite its’ glaring coughpetscough faults.

The pet is a liability…for the simple reason it takes damage control out of your hands and into an AI. There’s really no way around that, no matter what ANet says. In PvE(and perhaps sPvP) it’s actually an advantage, however, in dungeons and W3 they are huge liabilities. I have to try my kitten off to be effective on my exotic/ascended ranger in W3, yet when I switch to my exotic/rare guardian I can usually just power through the same scenarios using a few key skills.

I suppose if you really like micro-managing, then GW2’s version of a ranger is for you.

Obsidian.1328:

I suppose if you really like micro-managing, then GW2’s version of a ranger is for you.

Always been a compulsive Micro’er but I’m not stupid either, I can TELL that our combined efforts (both mine and my pets) just aren’t measuring up in dungeons.

I find it ESPECIALLY interesting that my pet can usually ‘tank’ more damage than me out in the Persistent zones against most mobs, yet last night when the stupid Mouth of Zhaitan sucked us in and than SAT on both of us… my woofie died instantly but I still had 40% of my HP’s left. …Granted I’m pretty tough even by survivalist Ranger standards…. but still…

It really seems like Pets have a severe Mitigation PENALTY versus dungeon bosses. If we’re on the topic of things that we should be able to “train our pets” up to, I think that right there is a good starting place. It’s just a bad mechanic in general because it MAKES US look bad when we can’t even stow our pets permanently. (they always pop back out the intstant we’re put back into combat)

Pets should get their own traits that you can fill out yourself, allowing you to build them to your liking. The pet also does appear to act odd in dungeons, call me crazy but it almost seems that they take more damage in there. The most massive flaw however (and really there isn’t much they can do to fix this) is the fact that pets use AI, and we have only limited control over them.

On a side note:
One thing that I truly miss from Gw1 that the ranger had were preparations. Granted, they weren’t handled very well in GW1, but they would have been perfect for GW2.

Another thing that I miss from GW1 was that you could CHOOSE to bring a pet, in GW2 its either bring your pet, or just grab another class.

Jalad Lantana.3027:

First and foremost, GW2 pets have generaly excellent path finding. The occasions when a pet takes a senseless detour are very few, and easily overcome by using pet swap.

Pathing is worthless in this game, particularly for bow users. Pet swap is not pathing but more of a cop out as you’re merely heading towards the target and porting the pet there.

Real pathing involves the pet finding its own way which this game has very little of. It doesn’t even know how to jump off a ledge.